


The Inevitable Feast

by Nerve_Itch



Category: Hannibal (TV), Hannibal Lecter Series - All Media Types
Genre: Cannibalism, Force Feeding, Gen, Knives, M/M, Post shiizakana, Power Dynamics, Violence, mostly just meat, other cutlery, s2 spoilers, symbolism - symbolism everywhere
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-01
Updated: 2014-05-01
Packaged: 2018-01-21 11:23:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,390
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1548794
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nerve_Itch/pseuds/Nerve_Itch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Will is subjected to the repurcussions of Hannibal's appetite</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Inevitable Feast

The dining table in Dr Lecter’s house holds a smell like blood oranges, like heather and like objects long since burnt. Will sits at its head, pushes his back against the wooden chair and presents the version of himself who is confident in sitting at Hannibal’s table. His shoulders coil backwards just once, adjusting into a poise of intent, controlling and calming the nerves running down to his fingertips where they rest above diamond sharp cutlery. He presents the version of himself that notices the accents of scent in a room and pins them to these more benign associations of fruits and flowers, rather than acknowledging the piles of dead meat that have laid on its surface.

“You will be pleased with the meat.”

The voice carrying from the next room used to sound musical, Will thinks, but now it resonates like something hungered, something inhuman calling up from a pit in the earth.

If he is to play his part with conviction, he will need to enjoy the meat.

He _supplied_ the meat.

The air is beginning to ripple with new smells, burning and metal smells, and Will’s blood-boned knuckles twinge. He’s caught between the need to preserve the pieces of himself that know how irrevocably _horrific_ this is, and the need to preserve the pieces of himself.

He catches the betrayal of his thoughts and he’s chewing back thoughts of himself inside out, laid on the white plate in front of him, as Hannibal enters. Steam and a stench of opportunity follow the white dish carried in Hannibal’s hands. Will’s making the transition back into the thoughts of the person who wanted Randall dead – wanted Randall controlled, annihilated, _consumed_ – and quashing the ever-quietening voice that offers up justifications as pithy as ‘self-preservation’ as Hannibal sets the dish in front of him.

His warm hands rest on Will’s shoulders with enough pressure to convey encouragement, and a promise of strength still unmatched.

“This is your feast, Will. Your carving of the dish is not yet complete.”

Hannibal’s shadow shifts, and the light of the room illuminates the fleshed rack of ribs, glistening in the white dish with wine-reddened sauce and looking unmistakeably _human_.

The version of Will that reaches for the carving knife at his right hand is the same person who ripped a hole in this body while it was still breathing, and knew that the action was _righteous_. This version swallows back the instinct to vomit or to scream, watches Hannibal take a seat to his right, and rests the knife on the crisped skin of a ribcage. He’s careful to look Hannibal in the eyes as he makes the incision.  There’s a practical part of him that questions how a knife is supposed to cut through the bone, that panics at the lack of etiquette that this situation confronts him with and forces him to admit that this would be easier if he could only pick the whole thing up and break it with his hands. This is the part that Hannibal reacts to; it’s a minute shift of expression that flinches his nostrils and sparks his dark irises.

“Carve.”

Will presses the knife in and feels the contact between metal and bone. The surge of power he’s used to feeling through a filter, through imaginings, feels raw. The flexibility of bone under his pressure lends him courage and he lets himself feel the immersion of borrowed strength. Imagines Hannibal’s ribs under his knife as he feels the bone snap and carves through the muscles that hold it to the frame. He lets out a terse exhale and accepts the fork that Hannibal is proffering, balancing the severed spear of meat on its prongs and delivering it to the plate on his right.

He is the provider, the hunter. This is his offering.

He steadies an unwelcome tremble in his wrists and begins to carve the second rib for himself.

“Tell me what you are thinking, Will.”

The meat on Hannibal’s plate looks uglier than he’d expected, ungarnished with any pretence of this simply being a meal.

He speaks before he has a chance to calculate his words.

“That this is a completion.”

Will catches the echo of his voice and the quiet part of him clings onto the fear that the sincerity of his words evokes.

Hannibal appears to be pleased, satisfied, and the approval that this implies makes carving the second bone seem easier, somehow.

 The meat plops onto his own plate with less grace than the setting urges, and Will accepts the inevitability of what now needs to follow.

“I think we are beginning to reach an understanding of each other better than I had first hoped” says Hannibal, fingers reaching round the stem of a glass filled with berry red wine. “A toast,” he says in a low voice, “to realised potential.”

Will’s fingers fumble for his own glass of wine that has been breathing for too long and he pushes a hard smile into his expression.

“To friendship” he offers and immediately regrets the crassness of his words.

A reciprocal distaste flashes across Hannibal’s expression as he sets his glass back down, and Will knows that in those ill-chosen words, he’s laid too many of his cards across the table.

“You asked that I do not lie to you. Please, Will, do not believe that I am in any way blinkered when it comes to our interactions. I suspect that the word ‘friendship’ has a meaning to you that is foreign in my company and I am not yet asking you to reassess this in order to humour me.”

Will accepts the rebuttal and feels his strength diminishing under Hannibal’s inscrutable insights.

“The _friendship_ I’m referring to is an…an _understanding_ …between two people that I’m afraid I don’t know any other word for” he offers, taking a sip from his wine and not breaking eye contact.

Hannibal accepts the justification, takes a sip of wine and watches Will through narrowing eyes.

The smell coming from his plate is raw – almost fetid – as he pulls the cutlery into his grasp. The steam has dissipated but the heat is still enough to make his eyes prickle. He pushes his discomfort away and forces the persona that wants to _eat_ to the fore. Hannibal grips his knife hand and Will lets Hannibal’s inherent dominance guide his knife across the rib, pulling the flesh onto his fork and lifting it to his mouth.

_What’s happening is what was always supposed to happen._

Satisfaction clings to Hannibal’s face and Will knows that he is, in some way, _accomplished_ in his eyes. The meat sticks to his teeth as he chews, the wine and garnishes lost to the sensation of something inhuman.

Hannibal watches.

Will chews.

It’s not his darker self who’s winning now, he tells himself as strings from the meat knot themselves between his back teeth. This is just one other part of the act he’s playing out, he asserts, feeling the distortion of his own morality as he knows with this mouthful how fully and how completely he’s beaten Randall. It’s his strongest self that is letting him do this; playing his best move.

The meat turns to leather and to pulp in his mouth and the need to swallow presents a difficulty that Will is unequipped to deal with.

“You are showing him your dominance” says Hannibal, raising his own knife and fork in controlled solidarity.

Will’s throat constricts around the first coil of masticated _human meat_ and It stalls. Tickles at his tonsils, like a cough. In the second that he looks away for some external source of strength he knows does not exist, he knows that Hannibal has seen him falter and knows that the cards he has laid on the table are a short hand.

He doesn’t see Hannibal leave his seat, doesn’t hear him. He only feels the pressure of a body standing behind him and feels the impenetrable power of arms gliding down his own, grasping his wrists from behind and moulding his fingers around the knife and fork.

He’s lost.

“Are you in charge of him, Will?” asks Hannibal, hot breath whispering over his ears.

Hannibal’s fingers guide Will’s to the next potential mouthful as the first is still convulsing in his oesophagus.

Will swallows, coughs, and the sound of accidental protest reverberates through the room. He’s used to having his back to Hannibal; had convinced himself that the courage he showed each time he let the monster prowl beyond his periphery was genuine. The instinctual awareness of danger feels validated in this moment.

“Or are you the accidental victor in a fight that you’ve yet to fully win?”

Fingers are guiding the next chunk of meat to Will’s mouth and he knows that if he were to refuse it, close his lips and refuse to partake in the remains of the ritual, he’ll only confirm the childlike impression Hannibal is forcing him to convey.

He opens his mouth and hates the obedience of the gesture, feels the echoes of softer times when he’d been subjected to Hannibal’s control and had no agency in it. Knows that the only way to confront this is to _accept_. He bites the food from the fork and blinks away the sting of humiliation.

“Good.”

Hannibal rests his left hand, and by extension Will’s, on the shirt above his collarbone, the tips of the fork nudging at the skin on his neck. Nothing about this is accidental.

“I want you to swallow him.”  
Will’s grip on the knife tightens, hands lowered as his Adam’s apple nudges against the fork with each attempt at swallowing. Hannibal’s hands are hot over his knuckles and respond to the tension with renewed purpose and Will knows that neither utensil is far enough within his control to be used as self-defence.  
The last of the mouthful – unsuccessfully chewed – forces itself down.

“Are you beginning to understand what it means to be fully in control of another person?” asks Hannibal.

Will knows that he is no longer referring to the dynamic that he held with Randall.

 He feels the shift in tension as the fork moves from his throat to his plate. The dread of another mouthful guides his right hand beneath the knife. It has to be now, or he’s another adornment on this table. His fingers relax, long enough for Hannibal to soften his grasp and give him enough leverage to shift his grasp to the base of the implement.

These are the tools that he provided.

He jerks the knife upwards, backwards, hard and sharp enough to slice through the skin between Hannibal’s fingers. _This is the last chance to beat him._

An ordinary person would have recoiled, recognised the pain of skin sliced from webbing to bone, but Hannibal reacts with no degree of shock and his reddening hand grips Will at the wrist, angling the weapon away from them and twisting his arm behind the chair. In the same momentum, his left hand pulls the fork from Will’s fingers and in a beat stabs the four prongs through the back of Will’s hand, the tips pressing into the table and pinning it in place.

The only scream in the room is Will’s and it sings back to him as proof that his fallibility in response to pain makes him so much weaker than Hannibal.

For a second, he’s reassured that this also makes him still human. Except the table is filling with pooling red and _he can’t be out of this fight yet_. He jerks his right arm, counts on the agility of his fingers to wrest the knife from Hannibal’s injured grasp. _He can’t lose now_. Not caught so far behind the redemption that would find him when this is over. Fingertips catch the sharp edge of the blade and the pain that sparks through his nerves forms a sheen of static across his senses. He’s sharing the grip on the handle with Hannibal and he thinks that this is symbolic, somehow, as he twists the implement and angles backwards into something soft. He ignores the detail of how the motion of the knife feels like an honest extension of his hand, even with Hannibal’s fingers twined around it, and ignores the disappointment that the motion lacks the full body of fury he’d wished for.

“You were on the cusp of learning so much more” says Hannibal, words only faintly discoloured by physical distress. Will jabs again with his knife hand, protesting the lack of contact with anything solid and instead feeling Hannibal’s grip with renewed ferocity. A dull snap inside his forearm tells him that the light-headedness he feels is not from blood loss, not yet. The fingertips of his left hand scrabble against the wet wood of the table for purchase, but no amount of frantic tugging and shifting of his weight in the chair is freeing him. There are damp hands on his shoulders, fingers flexing upwards, pressing on his neck. Between those fingers Will knows the knife is balancing, and as one hand reaches to cup his jaw, to thumb his mouth open, Will _understands_.

He closes his mouth on a fresh piece of meat, catching the trail of Hannibal’s thumb and gives up trying to protect himself.

“It’s far more than collecting a trophy” Hannibal tells him, his left hand creeping through Will’s hair.

Will understands that no matter who he’d been while he sat at this table, protégé or manipulator, he was _always going to end up here_.

“Swallow.”

Will closes his throat on the unchewed meat as Hannibal pulls his head back.

“There is a level of power that I only wish I could have shared with you fully” he says with a sincere melancholy in his voice.

Will knows the scratch of metal tracking from his throat to his chest, the tug against his shirt buttons as they shed in the wake of the knife. He clenches at the first incision above his sternum and loses track of its depth or damage as it continues. Without the sight of his blood, he can imagine something cleaner than pain flooding his nerves.

Hannibal has beaten him in every way and yet there’s a freedom, he thinks with diminishing acuity, in relinquishing power _completely_.  

**Author's Note:**

> I keep trying to write smut and horrible things like this come out instead.


End file.
